Lincoln's Words Give New Life To Needy Man

COMMENTARY

September 4, 1997|By Mary Schmich Chicago Tribune

His name is Dave Burgin. He was my first newspaper editor. He taught me half of what I know about the way words work, so it comes as no surprise that words would be his lifeboat. The surprise is only in which words.

''The stroke came on the 26th of July, a Saturday,'' is how he starts the story. ''A stroke is not a bang thing. It's a long ordeal. You don't know what's happening, but something's happening to you. You figure out it's not a heart attack. And believe me, if you have a choice between a stroke and a heart attack, take the heart attack.''

He laughs, weakly. ''Anyway, I end up on the bathroom floor. I can't get up. My left side is gone.''

Before long he's in the emergency ward at Marin General Hospital near his home north of San Francisco. He squints into the bright lights above his gurney, into a canopy of faces, sees looks that tell him he is dying.

''Keep him awake,'' says a doctor.

''You've got to hang on,'' says his wife.

She shakes him, shoves him, grips him by his golf shirt. He hears someone say that if he blacks out, he goes for brain surgery. If he goes for brain surgery, he figures, he's as good as dead.

''Then in walks a chaplain, a woman,'' he recalls, ''muscles her way in. Says, 'Are you right with God?' ''

The chaplain scares him most of all. He tells her to take a hike. He vows he will not die. But he's drifting toward someplace dark and far he doesn't want to go.

''Wake up,'' his wife, Judy, pleads. ''Say something. Talk.''

And so he begins: ''Four score and seven years ago . . . ''

He goes on, through every word and line of the Gettysburg Address, riding the comforting cadences he has known since he was a boy, until he reaches the final phrase: ''and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.''

''I can't follow that act,'' says the chaplain.

He starts again. ''Four score and seven years ago . . .''

Next thing he knows, he is in intensive care, having escaped brain surgery.

''I owe it all to Abe Lincoln,'' he says.

If he'd had to predict his behavior on the brink of death, he would have guessed he'd be screaming for forgiveness, notquoting Honest Abe.

But his life has been oddly linked to Lincoln's since he was born in 1939 in Kentucky, Lincoln's home state, on Feb. 12, the date of Lincoln's birth.

''My grandfather, Elmer, was a schoolmaster in Bobtown, Ky.,'' he says. ''He was a Lincoln scholar. He was thrilled that his first grandchild was born on Lincoln's birthday. When I was 2, according to family lore, I could do the Gettysburg Address, standing on a chair.''

He didn't really understand what he was saying until he was 19 and visited the Gettysburg battlefield. And it was only a few years ago, when he dissected the speech phrase by phrase with the help of Garry Wills' book Lincoln at Gettysburg, that he could recite it without a hitch.

But he's carried it in his head for years - through all the newspapers he has edited, from Orlando to Dallas to San Francisco to Oakland - figuring that someday it would help him win a barroom bet or dazzle a cop. It never dazzled anyone. Until he almost died.

''I'm not painting any miracles,'' he says. ''I'm just saying, 'Unbelievable.' Where did that come from? God, what you rely on in the strangest moments.''

Over the phone, I ask him to recite it.

''You testing me?'' he says. Then he recites.

His voice is weak, but I hear these words more clearly than I ever have, full of a passion that would make Abe Lincoln proud, uttered by a man for whom swallowing remains a triumph and walking just a dream.

''Tell all potential stroke victims to eat the cheeseburgers and have the beer,'' he says with a small laugh. ''Just memorize the Gettysburg Address.''